Grandparents
by rapid-apathy
Summary: Blood doesn't always make family and time never lets you forget them or the ones who were.


Title: Grandparents  
Fandom: -man  
Rating: G  
Warnings: None  
AN: For love_bingo prompt "Grandparents" (hence the oh so creative title)

They knocked on the door late in the evening. Both dressed in their church finery although why they had done so he didn't know. He had never seen her before. The boy not since he was a teenager. He was no doubt a man now but when he looked at him he only saw the spitting image of his father and a sweethearted five year old clinging to his beautiful mother he always remembered him as. The girl was holding a wadded bundle of pink and rocking it back and forth and she smiled at him and introduced herself as his wife. She was French and didn't speak any English. Her husband was half English and half Chinese and didn't speak much French.

They walked up onto the porch and the boy shook his hand and the girl kissed both of his cheeks. He invited them inside and offered them something to drink but they told him that they couldn't stay, they were only passing by and wanted to stop and see him and show him their new daughter. She presented out the small pink bundle and pulling aside the afghan a little puffy pink face fast asleep was inside.

Well look at that. She's quite pretty, he said to the boy. Your daddy would be crying his eyes out like a girl at such a sight.

Thank you, sir. I know he would.

She put out the bundle as if for him to hold it but he put out his hand and shook his head. Ce n'est pas grave, he said.

No?

He shook his head again and smiled. No, he said. Ça va.

She nodded and pulled the bundle back against her chest.

Well, wish you all could stay but thanks for coming out.

She kissed him on the cheek and walked down the porch steps.

Sorry we can't stay, the boy said. But she, well we, wanted Annette to meet one of her grandfathers.

I ain't nobody's grandpa.

Of course you are, you're mine aren't you?

If you say so.

From below she teased how that was just how it is when you're an old man and to get used to the word grandpa.

Sharp tongue on this one, Junior.

What can I say, the boy said.

Just means you married well is all.

And call me Allen.

That's alright, he said and leaned back against the door jamb. Well, you kids get on out of here, it's getting late.

The boy and his wife swaddled their baby girl tight back in her pink afghan and slipped a white crocheted hat onto her small head and walked to and loaded into their small black car. They waved to him and he nodded and they drove off down the drive.

He was an old man. The liver that should have given out decades ago still running through no will or intervention on his end. How he had lived that long he did not know and only figured it was one of God's last attempts to keep him from peace. He was ninety-six years old that year. He was born and abandoned in the winter of thirty-nine to a teenage girl in an abbey, and in that time he'd seen his world go from a child's blessed innocence to a never ending road of endless pain and endless death. He had spent his life fighting God's wars and had naught but an old gun he kept wrapped in a black cassock hidden in his footlocker to show for it. He had lost a wife and son only to end up being a father to someone else's son and he lost that one too. The world outside had gone from horses and candles to sound barriers and televisions and while he never much cared for or paid any mind to the world outside and its restlessness in birth and death and new and old, it never ceased to always remind him his wife and sons were long dead.

He stood leaning in the doorway of the porch for a long time. Long after the taillights of the Ford had disappeared into the blackness beyond the glow of the single yellow light bulb that hummed above the door. He took out his pack of cigarettes out of his front shirt pocket and shook one loose and lit it. He watched the white smoke curl up into the flood of stars above and thought about her dead for sixty years now and how he finally let her go and how he can see her as clearly as he did then.

Oh Maria, he said.


End file.
